No Way Home: Writers had plans for more Daredevil scenes

Last Updated on February 1, 2022

One of the many surprises in Spider-Man: No Way Home was the return of Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock aka Daredevil as Peter Parker’s legal advisor. After the Marvel Netflix series was canceled after three seasons, fans were invested in having Cox continue with the role in the MCU, and the No Way Home cameo guaranteed that his position was secured. As it turns out, the film’s writers had even more planned for Matt Murdock in earlier drafts of the script.

During a lengthy interview with The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith, Spider-Man: No Way Home writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers discussed the process of writing the film. McKenna then confirmed that the duo did have many other ideas for how Cox’s Matt Murdock factored into the movie and they did have more for him to do but they ultimately decided that it was best to limit Matt Murdock’s role to keep the focus on Peter Parker’s story.

“That was the challenge with this movie bringing all these other characters in. We love these characters, and you would love to see them do all kinds of stuff. But the question is, what is there room for? I could watch any of these characters we brought in just do a whole other movie by themselves or in some various combination, but we have to, ultimately, service the story of our Peter Parker and our Spider-Man. No matter how tempting it is … We had so many ideas come up in the room of, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if this guy does that, and these two meet and do that…?’ There’s just so many exciting permutations now that we’re playing in this sandbox. But at the end of the day, there was only so much we could do, and we didn’t want to do things that would distract from the story of our Peter and our Spider-Man. So absolutely, once we knew we were gonna have Matt Murdock, it’s like, ‘He could do this, he could do that, that would be so cool, wouldn’t that be great?’ … But ultimately, we always had to pull back on a lot of things to just make sure we maintained our focus.”

Spider-Man: No Way Home was already ambitious with the story it was telling, which featured the return of old villains and heroes. The fact that we even got the small cameo from Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock was just enough because at least it told the fans that future Daredevil stories would feature Cox in the role. That’s really all they needed to do to please the viewers.

Do YOU wish Charlie Cox had more scenes as Daredevil in No Way Home?